AAAAAAAAAAGH!

Why would anyone want to buy this image?


I don't know. But they do. This is one of my higher-earning photos at the moment, and seems to be popular with travel magazines.

For me, one of the great things about photography is that it's a sort of 'hunter-gatherer' activity. Unpredictable.

This is a perfect example. I found this massive beastie lurking in my bathroom one morning. What would you have done? Shuddered? Screamed? Flattened it, or washed it down the drain?

I thought 'That'll make a good photograph. Might even sell.' I left it in the bath and went away to have breakfast.

Making the photograph, later that morning, wasn't easy, even though the spider sat still. The lighting, in particular, was tricky. I used diffused flash and relied on the fact that I was in the bathroom (with lots of white and reflective surfaces) to bounce the light around some more. In particular, I wanted some shadows, to give the image a bit of depth, but not harsh ones that would distract from its form.

The exposure was also tricky. I didn't want the enamel of the bath to be a totally burned-out white, otherwise the spider would appear to be floating in mid-air (especially if the image is used on a white page).

I must admit, I'm not entirely happy with the result, even though its sold. The brownish lower right-hand corner annoys me. And, now I come to think about it, I would preferred to have had the spider coming out of the drain, head on to the viewer.

So ... now I'm waiting for another big spider to fall in my bath.

What's this?

Here’s a photograph sent to me by Marc Latham ...

An interesting and unusual image! It took me a moment to work out what it was, but then I realised that Marc was standing in the courtyard of an old building, pointing the camera directly upwards.

In my experience most people rarely look up, and it’s always a great idea to seek out interesting and unusual viewpoints.

However a criticism that I’d make of this image is that it has no subject and, as a result, is maybe a bit too puzzling. There’s something that appears to be a bird on the left-hand side, but it could also be a leaf, or even an object thrown out of a window. Then the vapour trail coming out of the chimney looks like it should be smoke ... but it’s too straight. And it cuts the image in half.

In his e-mail Marc wrote: I'm afraid my photos were not deemed to be of high enough quality when I submitted them to stock agencies.

I don’t know if he submitted this image as part of his trial batch but, if you’re trying to sell through agencies, a question to ask yourself is, “Why would anyone want to buy this image?”

The other thing to watch out for in photographs with large areas of uniform colour - like the sky - is ‘noise’. Most agencies will reject anything that is too ‘noisy’.

I can’t see, from the size of the image that Marc sent, if this image suffers from it, but here is some ‘noise’ from one of my images ...

This is a small section of sky, viewed at 100%. The noise is the random mottling. It’s caused by a variety of factors. Too high an ISO setting (the ‘film speed’) is one reason. But it may be due to the camera. Cameras with small sensors are particularly prone to it. That is one reason why the sensor size of a camera (rarely quoted in sales pitches) is far more important than the number of megapixels.

And if your camera suffers from it, this is one of the times you can say your equipment is letting you down.

A retired farmer

Here’s another image for comment, sent in this time by Catherine Nelson-Pollard.

About the photo she writes: This is a neighbour who used to be a farmer He misses having land to work on (he now lives in an apartment) so he finds any spare bit of land nearby even if it is next to the railway where he plants vegetables and crops. I took this standing slightly below the fence so the fence line is in the shot and across his face which I think is distracting. What do you think?

Thanks for braving public comment Catherine. What an interesting character. It’s a great idea to include something in a portrait that says something about your subject and you’ve done so in this image – the branches of what appears to be grapevines. It also looks like you've used fill-in flash to illuminate his face and give a catchlight in his eye. It’s a very useful technique, and one used all the time by pros (to the mystification of snapshotters. “Why’s s/he using flash in broad daylight?” they ask.)

However, I agree with you about the fence line. It is very distracting, especially as the wire runs directly beneath his nose!

On top of that, I would guess that having worked on the land, he has very interesting hands and he appears to be holding something ... the handle of a spade? But we can’t really see clearly because of the branches and dead leaves in the way. The hands could be a feature in a portrait of this man.

So, I’d say a higher viewpoint that lets us see his face and hands, but reduces the importance of the wire and branches, would work much better.

And there’s more ... your autofocus (I’d guess) has locked on to the fence wire so the principal point of interest in this image, your subject’s face, is out of focus. On many cameras a way around this is to point the autofocus spot at the point where you want the focus, depress the shutter half-way to lock the setting, and then move the camera to compose. Either that, or turn the autofocus off completely and focus by hand.

Finally, you seem to have got a touch of the dreaded ‘purple fringing’ in the sky. This is a form of chromatic aberration that digital cameras are prone to, especially when shooting against a very light sky. It’s grounds for rejection in many photo agencies.

There isn’t space to go into its causes here, but there is little you can do about it in-camera. Google the term and you’ll find out all the technical details, and several ways of getting rid of it with image editing programs.

Thanks again Catherine. Look forward to seeing more of your photographs.

Other comments anyone?

The photographer's dilemma

What do you do when, as a photographer with a camera, you are a witness to something out of the ordinary?

Do you record it through your medium? You are, after all, a photographer and one aspect of the art is about capturing the moment ... human emotions ... confrontations ... strife ... achievement.

But if you raise your camera you could be accused of voyeurism. Or worse.

On the other hand, if you pass on by - what sort of a photographer are you? A wimp who only does luminous landscapes and babes on blankets?

Not so long ago I came across this little confrontation on the Mont Blanc Bridge in Geneva ...


Should I have walked on? Kept my camera down?

What do you think?

Madelaine

Following on from my suggestion (at the right there) we have a taker! Kirk Miller has kindly sent me a photograph of his daughter Madelaine:


What a beautiful portrait. Together with the perfect catchlights in her eyes, Kirk has captured a wonderful expression, spontaneous and happy with a hint of mischief, which is complemented by the warm colour tone. He got up really close too. This looks like it was taken with a moderate telephoto lens - I'd guess something like 130mm - which is ideal for portraiture.

About the making of it he writes: Madelaine was 90 degrees from the setting sun (shining on her left side) and my other daughter held a gold colored reflector 45 degrees on her right, shining it on her face...to balance the color and create the catch light in her eyes. The gold reflector was very warming, so I turned down the white balance a little in Lightroom. F6.3, 1/250 at iso 200 on a tripod.

It's first class, and a lot of trouble has been taken with it, but I'd make three observations:

1) I'm not entirely certain that the focus is correct. In a portrait (unless you are trying to say something else) the focus should be on the eyes. It looks to me, here, as if it's a little bit forward of that, on the plane of the collar of her jacket:

An eye at 100%:






And the collar of her jacket:








2) The background. Most of it is plain, but there is a distracting tree branch to the left. If Kirk had moved a few steps to his left (I guess) he probably could have got rid of it ...


3) And, finally, it might have been better in horizontal (portrait) format, cutting out the areas of blue on either side. Don't forget, you can turn your camera on its side!

Thanks, Kirk, for sharing your photo. It's beautiful. If anyone else has any constructive comments or observations I'll willingly post them.

And feel free to criticise my images too. We can all learn.

Pale Blue Dot

I don't have a lot to write today.

Someone has just shared this sequence of photographs with me ...

Tripod Terr'ist ... me?

(N.B.: This entry relates to an earlier post I made, on 6 February, entitled 'The Tripod Terr'ists'. Check on the list, lower right, to read it.)

So ... there I am this afternoon ... overlooking the major highway between Geneva and Lausanne, with a tripod and not one, but two cameras with telephoto lenses. And this security guy drives past slowly, all dark glasses, crew cut and German Shepherd snarling in the back.

I give him a wan smile and carry on with what I'm doing. Jess comes and sits close to me, tail between legs.

The security guy drives a little way down the road, turns around and drives past me again.

I try to pretend I haven't noticed. Jess insinuates herself between my ankles.

The security guy takes a side road, turns his wagon round and comes back a third time. Now he stops beside me. His German Shepherd is going crazy in the back.

I wonder if my French is good enough to explain what I'm doing.

He leans out of the window. "Is that a Border Collie?" he asks, pointing at Jess.

"Er ... yes. Border Collie, Appenzell crossbreed, actually."

"What a beautiful dog. How old is she?"

"Eleven months."

And we talk dogs for the next 5 minutes. Then he wishes me a "bon weekend" waves and drives off, his German Shepherd still barking at Jess.

Phew!. But ... two cameras and a tripod? What was I doing?

Nothing particularly exciting, or arty. Taking a photograph for a book I have coming out in September, an image illustrating how to use a tripod on a steep slope ...


... have one leg of the tripod pointing directly down the slope for maximum stability.

The camera on the tripod is just for 'show' but has a telephoto lens on it because that's when you may often use a tripod.

But I'd also put a telephoto lens on the camera with which I was photographing. I did this to compress the perspective and bring in the background hillside (it was actually a road embankment) without other extraneous junk. Believe it or not, there were electricity pylons, telegraph wires and a whole busy highway just beyond that camera.

Oh ... and try to use a tripod whenever you can, even if you're not photographing with a telephoto lens. It's is the best accessory you can get.

In fact some professionals say that the first thing you should do when you buy a camera is weld it to a tripod.

Yellow lorry in the sky

Sounds like a line from a Beatles song, doesn't it? Or does that date me?

This morning early, I had an equivalent of the yellow lorry ... but overhead.

For well over a week now the sky has been clear and blue. Every single night the stars have twinkled like diamonds scattered carelessly across a black velvet ...

... yeah, well, enough of that lyrical rubbish.

Bottom line - I got up at 2am for the eclipse of the moon and it weren't there. Clouds, great thick grey banks of them, rolled overhead.

Some people had stunning views however.

Mohammad Taher Pilevar captured this beautiful image in Hamedan, Iran:


And I'll bet it didn't come about by accident. Mohammad obviously worked at this one, selecting a spot where the mountains would be dimly illuminated by the rising sun, just as the moon set behind them. Just imagine how much less interesting this photo would be if the mountains were black silhouettes, with no detail in them.

Truly a 'made' photograph. Congratulations.

The Yellow Lorry Syndrome

I call it the 'Yellow Lorry Syndrome'.

In fact, it's just another version of Murphy's Law (which says: If something can go wrong, it will).

But my version of it comes from a time when I was photographing Mosi oa Tunya (otherwise known as the Victoria Falls) in Livingstone, Zambia.

There are billions of photographs of these magnificent waterfalls out there, the vast majority taken from the same old viewpoints. I wanted something different.

So I went back in to town and found a spot where the main street stretches away down to the Zambezi River with the spray of the Falls rising in the distance. I fitted a long telephoto lens to compress the perspective and put the camera on a tripod. Unlike the British police, the Zambian bobbies didn't seem too bothered by cameras tripods, even though there was a bush war raging just across the Falls in Rhodesia at that time.

I was about to take the carefully-composed picture when a large yellow lorry drew to a halt directly in front of me and the driver proceeded to unload the contents. He was there so long that I packed up, and returned in the afternoon (when, of course, the light wasn't so good for the spray).

But there is an upside. Sometimes yellow lorries can be fortuitous ...


(Technical note: This was also taken with a telephoto lens which has had the effect of compressing perspective.)

Lutte

Also known as 'schwingen' to the German-speaking Swiss. It means 'wrestling' and is one of the traditional sports in this country.

The Swiss have a number of pastimes which are unusual and not a little incomprehensible to the casual observer. Yodelling is widely known ...

(I shifted position when taking this photo to get as neutral a background as I could. It's not perfect, but was the best possible under the circumstances.)

Then there is steintossen, which involves flinging a huge lump of rock as far as possible (usually about 2 metres) and hornussen, an eccentric mixture of cricket and golf which is like no other sport in the world.

Last summer I went to a festival of lutte - the Swiss version of sumo wrestling. Unlike sumo wrestlers the Swiss appear to be somewhat over-dressed. Competitors wear an (almost obligatory) blue-striped shirt, trousers and over the top, a pair of hessian shorts. Bouts are fiercely fought in a sawdust ring, and the object is to press your opponent's shoulders into the sawdust. Each bout begins with the contestants formally shaking hands and ends with the winner brushing the sawdust off the loser's back.

I used a high shutter speed with this image, to freeze the action, and an on-camera flash to fill in the lighting (I was shooting into the sun as you can see from their shadows). I also tried to get down low to increase the drama.

One of the great things about these sports is that they are small-scale, local and friendly. Very often they are just played out in a field somewhere, between neighbouring villages, with copious supplies of white wine and cervelas (a Swiss sausage). You can see from the image above, the crowd of spectators is not exactly gigantic.

Now 'sumer is icumen in' ... time to get out into the fields and find some bouts of steintossen or hornussen to photograph.

Model poser

It's a simple fact - photographs of people in sell better than any other.

But where to get the people to appear in your photos?

First, if you are hoping to sell your photographs for commercial purposes (rather than editorial, which is a different matter) for every recognisable person you need a model release. That cuts out, for example, photos taken at sporting events, or shots taken in the street. Can you get a whole football team to sign model releases? And what about the crowd in the background?

In fact, many apparently candid photographs that you see in magazines or on posters are carefully posed, with professional models.

But professional models are expensive. For me, at this stage of the game, it's not economically feasible to hire one. I'd never recoup the cost.

So what about using family and friends (or dog)?

It's a possibility. But getting the right image often requires a lot of faffing around ... trial shots ... adjustment of lighting or props ... changing of angle or backdrop. Family members tend to lose patience, and friends don't stay friendly very long. Even the dog gets twitchy.

There is one last resort. Use yourself. With a bit of ingenuity almost anything is possible.

I had the idea of taking a series illustrating an alternative view of computer use. The majority of images available in this area show smiling people working peacefully, even contentedly, at their machine. You know the scene ... Mum, Dad and a kid gazing down at the monitor with its soft glow gently illuminating their happy, oh-so-happy faces.

Don't we all know the reality? Scowls, howls and hair-tearing, more like, as the computer throws up incomprehensible error messages, or a paper clip taps irritably on the screen at us.

Here's the sequence I came up with, using myself as a model. After all, if Alfred Hitchcock can do it, why can't I? And you can see it took some time to achieve ... spot the difference in one image.

First puzzlement






















Then incomprehension

















And finally, downright fury

(Please note, no computers were harmed in the making of these images.)

Lunatic?

If the sky is clear on the morning of 21 February I will be getting up at around 1am and setting out, with my camera gear, to some pre-determined spot.

Lunatic?

Yes. But it’s for one of nature’s less-common spectacles. Over a period of nearly 4 hours the full Moon will fade away to almost nothing, then return to its glory - a total eclipse. The next one won’t take place until 2010.

An eclipse of the Moon happens when it passes through the Earth’s shadow and, because our largest natural satellite shines with reflected sunlight, it appears to go out ... but not quite. In fact, it will probably turn a deep coppery red. The exact shade cannot be predicted in advance. In some eclipses the Moon almost vanishes. In others it just turns a sort of brick colour. The exact shade depends on the amount of dust in the earth’s atmosphere. For a very comprehensive explanation of why, and what happens during an eclipse, read here.

This eclipse will provide some interesting photographic opportunities, but I’ll have to be prepared – finding a suitable site in advance, knowing where the moon will be in the sky at that time, and dressing up warmly.

The visible part is predicted to start at 1:43 Universal Time (UT, also called GMT) which is 2:43 in most of Europe (Switzerland, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Netherlands, Scandinavia, etc.). If you live elsewhere you’ll have to calculate how your time differs from UT. You can find a good interactive map here. Then totality, when the Moon has faded away to almost nothing, will last about 50 minutes, from 3:01 to 3:51 Universal Time.

There are many way to photograph a lunar eclipse, far too many to cover in this blog, but if you want further details, go to Fred Espenak’s very comprehensive instruction page, here.

I’m sort of hoping for clear skies on Thursday night ... though if I’m really honest, I won’t be devastated if it’s cloudy. Then I can stay in my nice warm bed.

Carpe diem II

You think landscapes are static ... geological even. Not much changes, and there's plenty of time to set up your camera, compose a shot and maybe make a cup of tea whilst considering your composition.

Think again.

Whilst landscapes don't move as fast as a Formula 1 Ferrari, things change pretty quickly, especially at dawn and dusk.

I took this photograph on the shores of Lac Léman (Lake Geneva) at dawn one October morning. This is the way it was ... no red filter used or Photoshop manipulation. I have increased the saturation a little (as digital cameras give duller images than film) and tweaked the dynamic range (because digital cameras don't handle this so well either). But apart from that, nothing.


I'd been there, in that spot, for about 45 minutes before capturing this shot. In fact, I heard the fishermen start up their boat engines in a nearby port, and prayed that they would set out in my direction, at the right moment. They did! (I don't always get so lucky.)

There was a hotel behind me. Shortly before I took this shot a man threw open a bedroom window peered out and saw the scene.

Five minutes later he'd emerged from the hotel, still pulling on his sweater, with a camera in his hand.

But by then the light was pinkish, and only mildly pretty. The drama had gone ...

... and so had the fishermen.

Watch out!

If you sell photographs for commercial use, and they show identifiable people, you must get a signed model release, or face the possibility of serious legal action (particularly in the USA).

A model release is a document in which the person (or persons) whose image is shown affirms that they have no objection to it being used in publicity, or for any other purpose.

What really put the wind up photographers and agencies was a case in 2005 when a kindergarten teacher, called Russell Christoff, was awarded $15.6 million damages as a result of Nestle U.S.A. using his image on 'Taster’s Choice' coffee labels.

You can read more details of the case here.

And if, having heard that, you're now worried, check Getty Images website. They have kindly made a whole range of model releases available for all photographers. You can find them here.

But ... c'mon agencies. Aren't you getting a little bit too windy?

I recently made an image of Jess as a puppy, looking lost ...


It was rejected by one agency for 'lack of model release'.

Omigod ... have pets now started suing their owners in the States?

Anyone got an ink pad big enough for a dog's paw?

Carpe diem

It was a wonderful sunny day today, positively spring-like, which is bad news for skiers but good for photographers. So I took the opportunity of working on an image I've had in my mind for some time now - a sheepdog in action.

I persuaded my wife and daughter to act as assistants and Jess, our border collie (actually, she's a border collie/appenzellois crossbreed ... a mongrel) to be the model.

In fact, Jess didn't need much persuading. She'll do anything for a walk.

We headed for a large open field where I knew that the afternoon sun would be behind me. I set up the camera on a sturdy tripod and fitted a 70-200mm telephoto lens and my wife and daughter took up positions in front of me, but to either side. It was as if we three formed the apexes of a large triangle.

There was a bit of faffing about as I got the focus set, effectively at the centre of the base of the triangle - the line between my wife and daughter. This was no time to use autofocus. It wouldn't be nearly fast enough. The shutter speed was set to 1/320th second - fast enough to stop action on the dog, but not fast enough to blur the background. And the aperture was f11, enough to give me a reasonable depth of field and take care of any ficussing inaccuracies.

Then it was just a question of getting Jess to run back and forth between my wife and daughter - copious supplies of cheese morsels helped there, though she doesn't need much encouragement to run - whilst I fired away.

I won't tell you how many images I threw out. With the first attempts I realised I had too low a viewpoint and was getting a jumble of trees and buildings in the background. Then there were many with the dog half out of the picture, that were out of focus, or where she had strange postures.

But this one worked well ...

Flickr tricks

I sell my photographs through quite a number of agencies and I regularly get asked, "Don't people steal your images?"

Well ... no ... they don't actually. It does happen ... yes ... but it hasn't happened to me yet. Not that I'm aware of, anyway.

But any reputable agency will take steps to minimise the risk of theft. First, they will only show the image at small size and low resolution. So it isn't much use for any serious work. Then, on top of that, they will put a watermark on the image - a faint, transparent overlay of writing, lines or a copyright symbol.

That still doesn't stop people stealing them. My wife was in a seminar once where one of the presenters, in her PowerPoint presentation, used an image with an agency's watermark clearly visible. But such theft is small beer. And it demonstrates, to anyone in the know, that the presenter is a thief.

But be more careful if you post your images on Flickr or similar image-sharing internet sites. Some people, even professionals who should know better, post their images at full size and without watermarks.

And they get stolen.

Then the unfortunate photographer finds his/her images on sale at an agency under someone else's name and it is a headache to prove that you own the copyright, and get the images taken off.

Read about a recent case here

The moral of this story is, if you use Flickr (or similar) make sure your images are small, low-resolution ones and are watermarked. You can watermark them in Photoshop.

Better still ... don't use Flickr. What's the point?

Winter work

In a village, not far from here, I came across an elderly lady in a flowery dress, sitting at a table, making small round wooden boxes.

She'd take a circular base off a pile, wrap a thin lath around it, nail the lath in place and place the finished box to one side, with dozens of others.

Then she'd make another ... and another ... and another ...

I got into conversation with her and asked her what she was doing.

She told me she was making containers for vacherin cheese. It was winter work on farms in the Jura mountains of Switzerland, when the pastures were covered with snow. She went on to explain that the base of the box was pine, but the side was larch, a wood that could be flexed without splitting.

Vacherin Mont d'Or is one of the most delicious of Swiss products—a soft, almost liquid cheese, which is why each one has to have its own wooden box. It's seasonal, appearing in the shops in from September to April and is little-known outside the country. There’s more information, in English, here.

If you can find a vacherin cheese, try it. You’re in for a treat. Heated in the microwave with a few cloves of garlic stuck in through the crust, it’s to die for. (The recipe's here).

Enjoy!

The Tripod Terr'ists

The War on Terror continues in Britain with British bobbies on the ball.

In January well-known travel photographer Jane Sweeney was Stopped and Searched, apparently for using a tripod in the vicinity of the London Eye.

In Jane's words, "I set up my tripod by the London Eye and began taking photos of the Houses of Parliament, just like many other people that evening."

"Within minutes the police turned up to issue me with a Stop and Search order under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. They told me they'd been watching me on CCTV, and wrote down all my personal details - including my height, colour of my hair, clothes and shoes, etc. I was told I may face further investigation."

"None of the other people taking photos (or video footage) were given the same treatment - just me. It's worth knowing that if you dare to use a tripod you're now a terror suspect."

Bravo British bobbies!

It's a well-known fact in security circles that Terr'ists can be identified by their use of camera equipment on sizeable, unwieldy, conspicuous tripods.

The Terr'ists want to get an image of their target, pin-sharp in every last detail, before they try to blow it up.

=========

If, unfortunately, you are mistaken for a Terr'ist in the UK (and it does sometimes happen I'm afraid) you can get free legal advice from Liberty (0845 123 2307, website ) or, if you feel you have been treated badly, you can lodge a complaint with the Independent Police Complaints Commission (0845 300 2002, website )

Do you need a top-of-the-range, expensive camera ...

... to make good photographs?

The manufacturers would have you believe it. If you read their adverts you'd think that you can't possibly take anything that's worth looking at unless you have their latest brushed-silver offering with 10x zoom, image-stabilised face recognition technology, and a state-of-the-art multi-cellular noise-damped signal-enhanced CCD at its heart.

Hogwash. You can buy the best camera in the world, but if you don't have a 'visual eye' you'll still produce lousy photographs.

I have seen an exercise where several top professional photographers were given bog-standard point and shoot cameras to work with. Most of the results were stunning.

Or look at it another way - consider the equipment that the early photographers had to work with ... heavy plate cameras, manual focusing and exposure setting, weird lighting systems (if any) ... yet they produced amazing images.

The most sophisticated items of photographic equipment that you own are your eyes and your brain.

Context

An example of how a photographer often has to work at it to get the desired image ...

I've just got back from the Geneva Writers' Conference (yes ... I write as well as take photos) where I was talking to another writer/photographer.

She was writing a report on the Conference for a UK magazine and, to illustrate the report, she wanted an image of someone reading that particular magazine in Geneva. (Freelance writers take note - a relevant image or two makes an article a whole lot more interesting to editors.)

Trouble is, if she'd just gone outside with someone and snapped a photo, it would probably look like anywhere in the world. To say "in Geneva" in an image, you need to include some sort of icon. What better icon than the famous Jet d'Eau.

If this woman had a copy of the magazine in her hands, so it could be seen, would that put across the message?

But, to get something like that, my writing friend will have to make a trip to the fountain, or somewhere else unmistakably 'Genevan', on a fine sunny day, with a model.

Incidentally, to increase the dramatic impact of this image I used a wide-angle lens, low viewpoint and a polarising filter to darken the sky.

That's a little bit more than 'pushing the button'.

Begin at the beginning ...

Someone once said to me, "Photography's easy. It's just pushing a button."

It isn't. If you want to get really worthwhile photographs you have to work at it.

But sometimes you do have a stroke of luck.

Here's an image I took in Murano, the Ventian island famous for its glass-making. I was walking beside one of the canals, looked down an alley, and spotted the brightly-coloured domestic scene ...

It's an image that sells steadily for me through a range of agencies.

But that was pure luck. Most times you have to work at at getting the right image, and work pretty hard at it, too.

As well as taking photographs, and writing about taking photographs, I inspect images for one of the agencies. And you wouldn't believe the junk that some people submit in the hope of making a sale.

It's obvious that they belong to the '... it's just pushing a button' school of photography.

More than once my jaw has dropped open in amazement and my howl has brought the dog to my side with a whine of worry.

I don't like worrying dogs, or causing pain to anyone, including image inspectors. So this blog is going to be about the trials and tribulations of getting a decent, sellable image. Very often I don't get it right ... probably more often than not. When that happens I avert my eyes and quietly delete the disasters.

But when it does work, when I get a great image and people start buying it ... yes, paying me money for it ... that's a wonderful feeling.